The FCC voted 3-2 along party lines last December to repeal the rules, a decision that is facing a separate challenge from net neutrality supporters before the D.C. Circuit. The repeal went into effect in June, and Monday’s order will have no immediate bearing on the current state of the rules.

But net neutrality supporters celebrated the win on Monday, noting that it leaves in place a high court ruling that the FCC has the authority to regulate broadband like a public utility.

In addition to implementing the net neutrality rules, the FCC had also used that authority to impose strict data privacy rules on internet providers, though those regulations were later overturned by Congress.

“We’re grateful that a majority of the justices saw through the flimsy arguments made by AT&T and Comcast lobbyists,” Matt Wood, the policy director at Free Press, said in a statement. “The ISPs went all out to push FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to repeal the agency’s Net Neutrality rules — and then ran to the Supreme Court looking for a do-over on earlier cases that rightly upheld those rules.”

“There was absolutely no reason for the Supreme Court to take this case, and today’s denial puts to bed the chances of upending the correct appellate-court decisions,” Wood added.

But Republicans and industry groups behind the repeal of the net neutrality rules, downplayed Monday’s order.

A spokesperson for Pai, the current Republican FCC chair who pushed through the Restoring Internet Freedom order that wiped away net neutrality, said that the agency is still confident that the repeal order will be upheld as well.

“While we believed that the appropriate procedure here was to vacate the prior D.C. Circuit decision, that decision makes clear that the Commission has the discretion to classify broadband as an information service so we are confident that it supports the Commission’s 2017 Restoring Internet Freedom Order,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

In a brief note, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, from the court’s conservative wing, said they would have granted the petition, vacated the judgment of the lower court and remanded the case back down to the court to dismiss it as moot.

But those justices’ efforts to wipe away the ruling were thwarted by their fellow conservative colleagues who chose to abstain from the vote. Recusing themselves from the vote were Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who heard the case while on the D.C. Circuit, and Chief Justice John Roberts. According to Roberts’s 2017 financial disclosure form, he owned stock in Time Warner, which is now a subsidiary of AT&T, a company that is a member of USTelecom.